Clinton, Obama Likely to Split Today's Primaries

New York Sen. Hillary Clinton greets Heather Weaver with her seven-month-old, while campaigning at Lynn's Paradise Cafe on May 20, 2008, in Louisville, Kentucky.

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Supporters hang a sign as they prepare for the arrival of New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton at a campaign event at the Kentucky Exposition Center on May 19, 2008.

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Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, greet a crowd during a rally Sunday at Waterfront Park in Portland, Ore. An estimated 75,000 people came out to see the senator.

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Voters in Kentucky go to the polls today, while a mail-in vote wraps up in Oregon. Democratic candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are expected to split the primaries, with Obama favored in Oregon and Clinton expected to prevail in Kentucky. After today, only three Democratic contests remain.

Obama is on track to gain a majority of pledged Democratic delegates, according to voter polls taken before Tuesday. He needs only 17 delegates to reach the mark. That could help persuade superdelegates to throw support his way.

Clinton trails Obama in the delegate count by such a margin that it is mathematically unlikely she will overtake him in the remaining primaries.

But Clinton says she will carry on until the last primary vote is counted.

Backers of both candidates made high-profile pitches for support Tuesday.

The WomenCount political action committee, which supports Clinton, has taken out a full-page ad in The New York Times, calling for the former first lady to stay in the race until every last vote is counted.

On the CBS Early Show, Barack Obama adviser and former Sen. Tom Daschle said Democrats should start backing his candidate. Daschle says there's "clearly" a desire to unify.

Campaigning in the hills of northeast Kentucky one day before the primary, Clinton reassured supporters that their votes mattered.

"I'm going to make my case, and I'm going to make it until we have a nominee," she said. "But we're not going to have one today, and we're not going to have one tomorrow, and we're not going to have one the next day."

"And if Kentucky turns out tomorrow, I will be closer to that nomination because of you," she added.

But Illinois Sen. Barack Obama has already turned his attention to November's general election. Although he made campaign stops over the weekend in Oregon, where he drew a record crowd of 75,000 supporters at an event in Portland, his week's campaign schedule looked more like that of a nominee. His campaign had scheduled stops in Montana and Iowa, where he first upset the Democratic field by winning the state's caucuses in early January.

Even if Obama gains a majority of pledged delegates as expected, that still won't give him enough delegates to seal the nomination. But it would give his campaign bragging rights.

"A clear majority of elected delegates will send an unmistakable message — the people have spoken, and they are ready for change," Obama campaign manager David Plouffe wrote in a memo to supporters Monday.

Clinton has countered that she has a better chance of beating Arizona Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, in the fall. She has promised to stay in the battle for the nomination through June 3, when the final primary contests will be held in Montana and South Dakota.

On the campaign trail Monday, Obama mentioned Clinton only once, calling her "a fighter."

Primer on Oregon and Kentucky

Tuesday's contests in Oregon and Kentucky could be seen as an illustration of the two disparate wings of the Democratic Party.

Oregon is affluent, green and anti-war, with a large college-age population. Politically, the state is seen as a liberal leader in everything from bike trails to assisted-suicide legislation. The state has just two Republicans in its congressional delegation of seven, and the most prominent, Sen. Gordon Smith, recently turned against the Iraq war.

Kentucky represents the other side of the coin for the Democrats: rural and blue collar, with a long history of dependence on coal. The state twice voted for former President Bill Clinton but has otherwise voted for Republicans in five of the last seven presidential contests. Academics compare its demographics to West Virginia, where New York Sen. Hillary Clinton won the primary with 67 percent of the vote.

No one is disputing that Obama will take Oregon; the only question is his margin of victory.

"The early polling was 4 to 6 percentage points in his favor. The later polls have been 14 to 15 percent. I'm expecting it will be somewhere in between," says Kevin Smith, a political scientist at the University of Oregon.

Kentucky is "going to be another Hillary Clinton state," says Donald Gross, a political science professor at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. "She's way ahead of Obama, and there's nothing really that's going to fundamentally change to give him a victory."

With Kentucky secure, Clinton has felt free to go after Obama's territory, making lots of campaign stops throughout Oregon on Friday and Saturday. Her husband has spent time in the rural eastern areas of the state, known for their agricultural and timber industries, as well as for their Republican political leanings.

"I have been surprised by the degree to which the Clintons have emphasized Oregon, since it seems like a pretty clear case that Obama will win," says Robert Sahr, a political scientist from Oregon State University. "The Clintons are hoping to cut the margins."

Even though Oregon favors Obama and Kentucky leans heavily toward Clinton ahead of Tuesday's races, political scientists warn that neither Democrat can count on either state in the general election.

The majority of Kentuckians who register with a party choose the Democratic label, but the state is quite comfortable voting Republican in statewide contests.

"Clinton should win convincingly on Tuesday in Kentucky," says Joe Gershtenson, a political scientist at Eastern Kentucky University. "But both Hillary and Obama are running behind McCain in the general election straw polls."

And while Oregon's urban centers of Portland, Eugene, Salem and Corvallis are seen as liberal, the state overall has a long Republican history with an independent streak. It only began to shift Democratic in the late 1980s.

With Associated Press material and NPR staff reports

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